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932 An Empire Resigns
to be accepted. Beneath the smoothed surface, there were repeatedly serious conflicts
and rough interaction, but it was limited predominantly to official internal exchanges.
Finally, calm was only restored when the Imperial and Royal armies were successful.
With the gradually stronger mixing of Austro-Hungarian and German troops, a
new element crept in, since the German commanders, commanding generals and com-
manders-in-chief frequently did not get along with the Imperial and Royal officers,
sometimes sought to enforce their views in an expressly arrogant way and evoked in
this way above all with Conrad von Hötzendorf a previously almost unheard-of reac-
tion : time and again, Conrad came to the defence of ‘his’ generals. The most glaring
case was that of General of Cavalry Baron von Pflanzer-Baltin, Commander of the 7th
Army, who had to report sick in September 1916, since the German Supreme Army
Command ‘has no faith in him and therefore refuses to place German troops under his
command’.2249 Neither Archduke Friedrich nor Conrad could make a stand against this,
since they had to demonstrate all manner of compliance following the Brusilov Offen-
sive and the Joint Supreme War Command demanded just such a sacrifice. ‘The air was
thick enough to cut with a knife, as Colonel Zeynek noted. Wherever the Army High
Command could steer in the opposite direction, it did so. Therefore, aside from indi-
vidual cases where German and Imperial and Royal troops were deployed in one and
the same theatre, i.e. predominantly in Galicia, Russia and Bukovina, and for a time
also in Serbia, there were hardly any more dismissals and if there were, then they served
to re-establish peace among the quarrelling allies by means of transfers. The Imperial
and Royal Army High Command did not demonstrate comparable understanding to-
wards the army and troop bodies on the south-western front. There, ‘drastic measures
were taken’. Perhaps this was also connected to the fact that Emperor Franz Joseph
had repeatedly rebuked the Army High Command for its actions against civilians and
soldiers in the Galician theatre of war, but was evidently fully in agreement with the
measures taken in the area of the south-western front. As a result, the army leadership
and the civil administration were at one with their Monarch, who – as the American
military attaché in Vienna related following his farewell audience with the Emperor at
the end of October 1916
– wanted to fight the war against Italy ‘to the end’,2250 even, if
necessary, without German participation.
Until September 1917, no consideration was necessary in the ‘Imperial and Royal
private theatre of war’for the comrades from the north. From January 1918, after the
German 14th Army had withdrawn again, the old set-up was once more valid. The
change at the top of the Army High Command following the death of Emperor Franz
Joseph, however, had yielded multiple consequences at once. Emperor Karl was able to
settle many conflicts with the help of his Chief of Staff, Arz von Straußenburg. Not
only that : in view of the temporary shortage of senior officers and above all generals,
several of those who had not yet been definitively retired but only been placed on leave
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Titel
- THE FIRST WORLD WAR
- Untertitel
- and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Autor
- Manfried Rauchensteiner
- Verlag
- Böhlau Verlag
- Ort
- Wien
- Datum
- 2014
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-205-79588-9
- Abmessungen
- 17.0 x 24.0 cm
- Seiten
- 1192
- Kategorien
- Geschichte Vor 1918
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 1 On the Eve 11
- 2 Two Million Men for the War 49
- 3 Bloody Sundays 81
- 4 Unleashing the War 117
- 5 ‘Thank God, this is the Great War!’ 157
- 6 Adjusting to a Longer War 197
- 7 The End of the Euphoria 239
- 8 The First Winter of the War 283
- 9 Under Surveillance 317
- 10 ‘The King of Italy has declared war on Me’ 355
- 11 The Third Front 383
- 12 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 413
- 13 Summer Battle and ‘Autumn Swine’ 441
- 14 War Aims and Central Europe 469
- 15 South Tyrol : The End of an Illusion (I) 497
- 16 Lutsk :The End of an Illusion (II) 521
- 17 How is a War Financed ? 555
- 18 The Nameless 583
- 19 The Death of the Old Emperor 607
- 20 Emperor Karl 641
- 21 The Writing on the Wall 657
- 22 The Consequences of the Russian February Revolution 691
- 23 Summer 1917 713
- 24 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts 743
- 25 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein 769
- 26 Camps 803
- 27 Peace Feelers in the Shadow of Brest-Litovsk 845
- 28 The Inner Front 869
- 29 The June Battle in Veneto 895
- 30 An Empire Resigns 927
- 31 The Twilight Empire 955
- 32 The War becomes History 983
- Epilogue 1011
- Afterword 1013
- Acknowledgements and Dedication 1019
- Notes 1023
- Selected Printed Sources and Literature 1115
- Index of People and Places 1155